TLDR 2025-01-16

You might be tempted to save a few bucks by offshoring IT staff to a developing country on the other side of the world. But things tend to look very different when the rework bills start piling up…

Instead, many companies are choosing nearshore IT staff augmentation, which gives them access to highly skilled staff operating in the same time zone and culture as their in-house team.

Growth Acceleration Partners offers a pool of highly-skilled AI solutions architects, software engineers, data scientists and automation experts, at affordable rates and with easy on-site visits.

Connect with a GAP expert today

TikTok employees in the US will still have jobs even if the app is banned in the country. The company is apparently not planning to leave the US in the near term even if it is banned. The Supreme Court is expected to make a decision on whether to overturn the ban before the law takes effect on Sunday. TikTok's leadership team remains laser focused on planning for various scenarios and is continuing to plan the way forward.

Images of what appears to be the Samsung Galaxy 25 Slim have leaked. The super-thin smartphone has a flat front, flat back, flat sides, and three cameras on the back. It will be 6.4mm thick, about 1.2mm thinner than the Galaxy S24 and nearly 2mm thinner than the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The phone's camera system will include a 200-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a 50-megapixel telephoto lens with 3.5X optical zoom and a special design. It will have a Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and 12GB of RAM. The phone will apparently launch in May and may be showcased at Samsung's January 22 Galaxy Unpacked event.

Chinese scientists plan to build an enormous, 0.6-mile-wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves. The project has been dubbed 'another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth'. The Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest hydropower project. Based in China, it generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. The US, EU, and Japan have also been investigating solar satellite array technology - Japan's JAXA is set to launch its proof-of-concept satellite this year.

SpaceX's 100th launch of a Falcon rocket from pad 39A yesterday sent two landers on their way to the Moon. The mission also featured a successful landing of the Falcon 9 first stage on the Just Read The Instructions drone ship. It will take about 45 days for Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander to reach lunar orbit, after which the landing process will take just over an hour. The Resilience lander, which is carrying a 5kg rover dubbed Tenacious, will reach the moon in approximately four to five months, after which it will complete a lunar flyby before entering orbit around the Moon.

Most large language models (LLMs) aren't great at using less popular frameworks. This shouldn't be surprising, but it is an important developer experience problem. A simple and effective solution is for the framework to tailor instructions specifically designed for LLMs, rewriting documents, adding conventions and rules, and packaging the instructions. This can make LLMs much better at building apps for less well-known frameworks.

This Python library enhances OpenAI chat completion response by adding detailed information about token log properties. It works with OpenAI Structured Outputs, a feature that ensures models will always generate responses that add here to a supplied JSON Schema. The library provides utilities for analyzing and incorporating token-level log probabilities into structured outputs to help developers understand the reliability of structured data extracted from OpenAI models.

This article looks at the effects of congestion pricing and its impacts on traffic, time, enforcement, rideshare services, the people living in congestion pricing zones, and more. New York City now has congestion pricing - people have to pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. This has dramatically improved traffic in tunnels and bridges. The policy is aimed in part at getting people to switch from cars to trains, but trains have not seemed more crowded than usual.

Byju's, the most valuable startup in India's history, was willing to pay handsomely to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars in the US. It received $1.2 billion towards a global expansion. The company collapsed, setting off legal proceedings that may leave investors recouping only a small fraction of what they're owed. The case is a lesson about the perils of lending when money can rapidly disappear across borders.

Google Workspace user accounts remain until an organization's Google account is deleted - if the company account isn't deleted, anyone with access to the domain can reactivate the Google accounts for former employees.

Flashes is powered by the AT Protocol - while it supports photo posts, it is not meant to be an Instagram clone and will not offer all the same features.

Google has removed its $20 per user per month price tag on its Gemini Business plan but increased the price of all Workspace plans by roughly $2 more per month per user.

Replit wants to focus on enabling non-coders to use AI tools to build software themselves.

Panzootic diseases have the ability to infect, spread between, and kill a wide range of creatures and could be one of this era's defining threads to human health and security.

A 28-year-old woman is in love with her AI boyfriend after moving away from her husband and friends to go to nursing school.